Brain Drippings (Blog)

June 3, 2026

In my research for personal site building inspiration and examples I discovered an organization called Neocities (neocities.org). It offers free website hosting (though I think if you want to own your own domain name, as in you don't want your url suffixed by .neocities.org, you'd need to pay), and it's a nonprofit with the aim of organizing and connecting people interested in personal website building. If you create a neocities account and host your website there, your website becomes discoverable on the neocities website, where people can browse and click through to random people's sites. You can also follow profiles on neocities, which lets you keep track of sites you like and follow their development, as updates get posted to the user's profile.

There are also things called webrings, which are basically like online interest clubs which you can apply for your site to join, so long as that interest's reflected somewhere on your site. If you're a part of a webring, it's expected that you'll put a button that links to other websites in the 'ring on your site. At least that's my limited understanding from peeping into this world.

I only found neocities after I'd already paid to host this site and bought the domain name somewhere else, though I went ahead and made a neocities account and uploaded my site files there, so now this website is discoverable not only at thinkybrain.com, but also (a duplicate site) at thinkybrain.neocities.org. Maybe at some point, if I get this site looking a little cooler and with more content, I'll bother figuring out how to transfer over to paying for my domain through neocities and just host there.

Seeing other people's websites really overwhelmed me to be honest, and made mine feel completely inadequate and amateur. Some people are creating real works of art! Just take a scroll though the neocities "websites" tab (sorting by "special sauce" or "most followed" will probably yield the best sites, though even their "random" filter seems to heavily favor pages with lots of views) and you'll see what I mean. A lot of complex, interactive design that I'm totally intimidated by. I don't even know how to start making mine look as exciting as a lot of these.

I mean, it's so fun to look at the cool, creative things people are creating just for fun, and for the pleasure of other indie internet users. But I have this unfortunate trait where it's hard for me to just appreciate something cool without immediately becoming envious and feeling overwhelmed my the immensity of what's out there, making my own existence feel so minuscule in comparison.

Do you have ideas for how I could make by website look more interesting? Please put them here!